It has a name, it has an address, it even has a design. But until this week, Hong Kong’s M+ museum of visual culture didn’t have a curator to lead it.

That changed Monday, when the West Kowloon Cultural District Authority named Doryun Chong, currently of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, as its chief curator. He is due to start the job in September, joining the museum’s existing curatorial team.

“We have been searching for the right chief curator for years,” said Lars Nittve, executive director of M+, in a statement.

Slated for completion in 2017, the M+ museum has already held several high-profile mobile exhibitions, including “Inflation!,” a collection of inflatable sculptures that drew crowds to the West Kowloon site during this year’s Art Basel.

Born in South Korea, Mr. Chong graduated from the University of California at Berkeley and first worked as a curator at San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum in 1999. Four years later, he joined the Walker Art Center Minneapolis, and in 2009 became associate curator of painting and sculpture at MoMA, where he recently organized “Tokyo 1955-1970: A New Avant-Garde.”

The $709 million M+ museum building will be the focal point of Hong Kong’s much-delayed cultural district, which occupies 57 acres of reclaimed land overlooking Victoria Harbor. It will be designed by architecture firm Herzog & de Meuron, known for London’s Tate Modern, along with local firm TFP Farrells.

The museum’s broad mission is to highlight 20th- and 21st-century visual culture “from a Hong Kong perspective and with a global vision.”